Entrepreneurial renaissance cities striving towards an era of rebirth and revival

Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge ManagementEntrepreneurial Renaissance Piero Formica Editor Cities Striving Towards an Era of Rebirth and Revival... Systemic macro level Mode 3 Quad

Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management

Entrepreneurial Renaissance

Piero Formica Editor

Cities Striving Towards an Era of Rebirth and Revival

Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management

Series Editor

Elias G Carayannis

George Washington University

Washington, DC, USA

ISSN 2197-5698 ISSN 2197-5701 (electronic)

Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management

ISBN 978-3-319-52659-1 ISBN 978-3-319-52660-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52660-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933457

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

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I’ll sing of the sweet time of my first youth… (Petrarch, The Canzoniere)

Series Foreword

The Springer book series Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management was

launched in March 2008 as a forum and intellectual, scholarly “podium” for global/local, transdisciplinary, transsectoral, public–private, and leading/“bleeding”-edge ideas, theories, and perspectives on these topics

The book series is accompanied by the Springer Journal of the Knowledge

Economy, which was launched in 2009 with the same editorial leadership

The series showcases provocative views that diverge from the current tional wisdom,” that are properly grounded in theory and practice, and that consider

“conven-the concepts of robust competitiveness,1 sustainable entrepreneurship,2 and

demo-cratic capitalism,3 central to its philosophy and objectives More specifically, the aim of this series is to highlight emerging research and practice at the dynamic intersection of these fields, where individuals, organizations, industries, regions, and nations are harnessing creativity and invention to achieve and sustain growth.Books that are part of the series explore the impact of innovation at the “macro” (economies, markets), “meso” (industries, firms), and “micro” levels (teams,

1 We define sustainable entrepreneurship as the creation of viable, profitable, and scalable firms

Such firms engender the formation of self-replicating and mutually enhancing innovation networks and knowledge clusters (innovation ecosystems), leading toward robust competitiveness.

2 We understand robust competitiveness to be a state of economic being and becoming that avails

systematic and defensible “unfair advantages” to the entities that are part of the economy Such competitiveness is built on mutually complementary and reinforcing low-, medium-·and high- technology and public and private sector entities (government agencies, private firms, universities,

and nongovernmental organizations) (E.G. Carayannis, International Journal of Innovation and

regions and sectors) (E.G. Carayannis and A. Kaloudis, Japan Economic Currenrs, p. 6–10 January

2009).

individuals), drawing from such related disciplines as finance, organizational chology, research and development, science policy, information systems, and strat-egy, with the underlying theme that for innovation to be useful it must involve the sharing and application of knowledge.

psy-Some of the key anchoring concepts of the series are outlined in the figure below and the definitions that follow (all definitions are from E.G.  Carayannis and

D.F.J. Campbell, International Journal of Technology Management, 46, 3–4, 2009).

Systemic

macro level Mode 3 Quadruplehelix Democracyof

knowledge

Innovation networks

Creative milieus

Entrepreneur/

employee matrix

Knowledge

clusters Entrepreneurialuniversity

Sustainable entrepreneurship

Democratic capitalism

Academic firm

• The “Mode 3” Systems Approach for Knowledge Creation, Diffusion, and Use:

“Mode 3” is a multilateral, multinodal, multimodal, and multilevel systems approach to the conceptualization, design, and management of real and virtual,

“knowledge-stock” and “knowledge-flow,” modalities that catalyze, accelerate, and support the creation, diffusion, sharing, absorption, and use of cospecialized knowledge assets “Mode 3” is based on a system-theoretic perspective of socio-economic, political, technological, and cultural trends and conditions that shape the coevolution of knowledge with the “knowledge-based and knowledge-driven, global/local economy and society.”

• Quadruple Helix: Quadruple helix, in this context, means to add to the triple helix of government, university, and industry a “fourth helix” that we identify as the “media-based and culture-based public.” This fourth helix associates with

“media,” “creative industries,” “culture,” “values,” “life styles,” “art,” and haps also the notion of the “creative class.”

per-• Innovation Networks: Innovation networks are real and virtual infrastructures and infratechnologies that serve to nurture creativity, trigger invention, and

catalyze innovation in a public and/or private domain context (for instance, ernment–university–industry public–private research and technology develop-ment coopetitive partnerships).

gov-• Knowledge Clusters: Knowledge clusters are agglomerations of cospecialized, mutually complementary, and reinforcing knowledge assets in the form of

“knowledge stocks” and “knowledge flows” that exhibit self-organizing, learning- driven, dynamically adaptive competences and trends in the context of

an open systems perspective

• Twenty-First Century Innovation Ecosystem: A twenty-first century innovation ecosystem is a multilevel, multimodal, multinodal, and multiagent system of sys-tems The constituent systems consist of innovation metanetworks (networks of innovation networks and knowledge clusters) and knowledge metaclusters (clus-ters of innovation networks and knowledge clusters) as building blocks and orga-nized in a self-referential or chaotic fractal knowledge and innovation architecture (Carayannis 2001), which in turn constitute agglomerations of human, social, intellectual, and financial capital stocks and flows as well as cultural and techno-logical artifacts and modalities, continually coevolving, cospecializing, and cooperating These innovation networks and knowledge clusters also form, reform, and dissolve within diverse institutional, political, technological, and socioeconomic domains, including government, university, industry, and non-governmental organizations and involving information and communication tech-nologies, biotechnologies, advanced materials, nanotechnologies, and next-Generation energy technologies

Who is this book series published for? The book series addresses a diversity of audiences in different settings:

1 Academic communities: Academic communities worldwide represent a core

group of readers This follows from the theoretical/conceptual interest of the book series to influence academic discourses in the fields of knowledge, also carried by the claim of a certain saturation of academia with the current concepts and the postulate of a window of opportunity for new or at least additional con-cepts Thus, it represents a key challenge for the series to exercise a certain impact on discourses in academia In principle, all academic communities that are interested in knowledge (knowledge and innovation) could be tackled by the book series The interdisciplinary (transdisciplinary) nature of the book series underscores that the scope of the book series is not limited a priori to a specific basket of disciplines From a radical viewpoint, one could create the hypothesis that there is no discipline where knowledge is of no importance

2 Decision makers—private/academic entrepreneurs and public (governmental,

subgovernmental) actors: Two different groups of decision makers are being addressed simultaneously: (1) private entrepreneurs (firms, commercial firms, academic firms) and academic entrepreneurs (universities), interested in opti-mizing knowledge management and in developing heterogeneously composed knowledge-based research networks; and (2) public (governmental, subgovern-mental) actors that are interested in optimizing and further developing their

policies and policy strategies that target knowledge and innovation One purpose

of public knowledge and innovation policy is to enhance the performance and

competitiveness of advanced economies

3 Decision makers in general: Decision makers are systematically being supplied

with crucial information, for how to optimize knowledge-referring and edge-enhancing decision-making The nature of this “crucial information” is conceptual as well as empirical (case-study-based) Empirical information high-lights practical examples and points toward practical solutions (perhaps reme-dies), conceptual information offers the advantage of further-driving and further-carrying tools of understanding Different groups of addressed decision makers could be decision makers in private firms and multinational corporations, responsible for the knowledge portfolio of companies; knowledge and knowl-edge management consultants; globalization experts, focusing on the interna-tionalization of research and development, science and technology, and innovation; experts in university/business research networks; and political scien-tists, economists, and business professionals

4 Interested global readership: Finally, the Springer book series addresses a whole

global readership, composed of members who are generally interested in edge and innovation The global readership could partially coincide with the communities as described above (“academic communities,” “decision makers”), but could also refer to other constituencies and groups

Foreword

Victor Hugo wrote ‘there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come’ and so it is with the key idea put forth in this book We are at a unique point in his-tory where multiple disruptive technologies are arriving at the same time, enabling multiple and multiplicative situations in which Schumpeter’s ‘creative disruption’ is happening, destroying old leaders and regimes and creating new winners The tidal wave of digitization that is occurring as Moore’s Law and Gilder’s Law collide with virtually every domain is unstoppable

Everywhere automation, substitution, dematerialization and transformation are taking place wherever ICT resources are available and used—and that is almost everywhere Cloud computing and software as services allow small companies to compete with the very largest ones Big Data is allowing the monetization of data and creating game-changing insights into everything from consumer behaviour to drug discovery to precision medicine The Internet of Things will allow many physi-cal entities to have a virtual identity and presence and will allow high-precision, high-frequency control loops to be put in place where previously open loop control was possible For example, real-time distributed air quality monitoring will allow real-time traffic management and dynamic incentive modification for park-and-ride facilities to optimize between the best air quality, commute times and fuel manage-ment in cities and elsewhere There are many more opportunities with other emerg-ing technologies, such as block chain, creating new previously unthinkable possibilities These disruptive technologies, coupled with the increasing availability

of venture capital and increasing connectivity, are creating a new primordial soup which is beginning to unleash a Cambrian explosion of innovation and entrepre-neurship that forms the basis of Professor Formica’s entrepreneurial renaissance.Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2) is emerging as a new mode and paradigm of innova-tion to help us get collectively to shared prosperity and shared sustainability which ultimately lead to sustainable intelligent living This recognizes that the unit of com-petition has moved from how good an individual organization is to how strong the particular ecosystem in which the organization resides It also recognizes the impor-tance of the user, customer and citizen in the innovation process The core pattern at the heart of OI2 is shared purpose, where shared vision, value and values are

espoused, lived and created Professor Formica deliberately focuses on cities as the melting pots of this new renaissance, and with some justification Many trends show more and more people moving to cities and mankind has just passed a major mile-stone, with more people now living in cities than elsewhere There is a compelling logic behind this shift, as cities are the nexus of opportunity and innovation Luis Bettencourt, of the Santa Fe Institute, and colleagues have shown that cities’ eco-nomic attributes tend to scale super-linearly; that is, rather than outputs scaling pro-portionally with population in a linear fashion, outputs that increase super-linearly scale consistently at a non-linear rate greater than one for one Bettencourt et al showed that, with each doubling of city population, each inhabitant is on average 15% wealthier, 15% more productive and 15% more innovative.

Conversely, cities resource efficiency scales sub-linearly, in that the more people there are using a city’s shared infrastructure, the more resource efficient is the city per head of population This is a recipe to help achieve a more sustainable world Increasingly the topic of urban metabolism, which is a holistic or unified way of viewing all the activities of a city, is being studied and thought about as a way to move towards sustainability According to Kennedy et  al (2007, p.  43) urban metabolism can be defined as ‘the sum total of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy and elimina-tion of waste’ Dolly Greenwood (2010) has advanced the hypothesis that the degree

of ‘connectedness’ increases idea generation across an ecosystem to advance the capacity of an ecosystem to innovate Increasingly cities councils such as those in Dublin, London and San Jose are explicitly working to cultivate and orchestrate the ecosystem to help enable entrepreneurial activity to advance growth and sustain-ability Taken to the ultimate level, one could imagine a manifestation of Peter Russell’s (2008) ‘global brain’, where the very high level of connectivity and light- speed communication could help elevate a city’s population to a new stage of col-lective consciousness

In parallel there is a movement for young people to consider serial ship more actively as a lifelong career The late Diogo Vasconcelus, a Portuguese politician and Cisco Fellow, was one of the first people to espouse the notion that, rather than students having the ambition to become ‘employees’ when they left university, they were increasingly harbouring an ambition to become entrepreneurs driving change and creating employment for others The concepts of purpose-driven innovation and social innovation sit very comfortably with the new class of entre-preneurs who want to solve problems and be profitable at the same time The President of the EU Committee of the Regions, Markku Markkula, has been a key driver of the concept of orchestrating regional innovation systems and smart spe-cialization strategies within which individual entrepreneurs can flourish and achieve synergistic growth Professor Formica’s book and the contributions from many dis-tinguished people sharing narratives and patterns from their own cities is an impor-tant contribution to the literature and offers key practices and exemplars that can be used to get us all collectively onto a trajectory for sustainable intelligent living fuelled by this new entrepreneurial renaissance I encourage us all to be bold and

entrepreneur-‘Dream, Dare, Do’

Martin Curley

Bettencourt LMA, Lobo J, Strumsky D, West GB (2010) Urban scaling and its deviations: revealing the structure of wealth, innovation and crime across cities PLoS One 5(11):e13541 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013541

Greenwood D (2010) Collaborate to innovate: innovative capacity index for effective open tion Doctoral Thesis, University College, University of Maryland https://www.academia edu/4451912/Collaborate_to_Innovate_Innovative_Capacity_Index_for_Effective_Open_ Innovation Accessed 8 Dec 2016

innova-Kennedy CA, Cuddihy J, Engel Yan J (2007) The changing metabolism of cities J Ind Ecol 11(2):43–59

Russell P (2008) The global brain: the awakening earth in a new century, 3rd edn Floris Books, Edinburgh

Foreword

I am writing this on my 76th birthday Reading through this thought-provoking book has prompted memories of five decades of professional life Piero and his fel-low authors have stimulated reflections on the ways I have seen attitudes, cultures, mindsets and practice evolve and change, and how much of my experience I can relate back to earlier times of great creativity in history, which Piero himself relates

to our age with his passionate and articulate narrative about the Renaissance, inspired very significantly by the great thinkers and families of his native Italy in those times Some of us have been suggesting that in this century—described by the Royal Society in the UK as ‘The Century of Science’—we may be living in ‘a new Renaissance’

The wonderfully comprehensive introduction by Piero sets the scene for a tion of diverse studies of how this proposition may indeed be considered as being close to reality in a number of centres around the world It has long seemed to me that when we consider those moments when the world was set on undergoing change of momentous proportions we find, at the centre point of real revolutions or significant evolutionary change, major advances in communication, connections and the commitments of people to connect and communicate Early in the text we are reminded by Piero of the importance of Einstein’s great statement that ‘intuition

collec-is a sacred gift’ ‘Dream, Explore, Dcollec-iscover’—we are urged to consider; and so it should be But beyond dreams, great explorations and discoveries comes the pas-sion and commitment to connect and communicate For me, the two great heroes who enabled the proliferation and globalization of knowledge and invention have been Johannes Gutenberg and Tim Berners-Lee

I was fascinated to read in such detail some of the accounts gathered by Piero of the great families of the Italian Renaissance We can now see, in many places, the transformation of ideas, imagination and vision into action, and the passing on of knowledge through human interaction and the concept of the ‘bottegga’ (work-shop), which I see practised today under other names—for example the ‘design factory” process being championed by the highly innovative Aalto University in

Finland, and the ‘Fab Labs’.1 In my native Cambridge, the success of the ‘IdeaSpace’

in the University has been remarkable in the encouragement of supported ideation leading to acceleration of start-up and scale up of businesses

I return to my thoughts of Gutenberg, in 1458, and the combination of his vative thinking and skills in mechanics and metallurgy which made possible the rapid dissemination of knowledge and entrepreneurial thinking across Europe and the wider world, and the proposition that we are indeed entering (or are already part of) a ‘New Renaissance’, based surely upon the World Wide Web—introduced in

inno-1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and having potential we have not yet fully imagined Here are disruptive approaches to communication and connectivity—500 years apart However, both of these great inventions serve the purpose of the individual, the university, the corporation and indeed society—if used appropriately

Much has been written about the earlier Renaissance as an ‘Age of Knowledge’,

or the summation of such an age As I reflect on the inspiring opening of the book (it must be read and re-read!) and the more practical case study chapters, I am more than ever convinced that our present transition as peoples is from an Age of Knowledge to a new ‘Age of Imagination’ Albert Einstein repeatedly reminded us that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’ and that knowledge itself is limited From the opening and subsequent chapters I draw inspiration and comfort supporting my own deeply held convictions that innovation—properly under-stood—is so critical for bringing ideas, knowledge and the best research into being

in forms useable by mankind and helpful to society

If indeed we are part of a re-birth, a regeneration, a ‘changing of ways’, then—reflecting on my daily existence, seeking to maintain very many connections and interests—I am drawn to conclude that, like many, I must become a modern day Hermes, the Olympian God referred to in the text who played several roles simulta-neously, travelling in different directions I wonder how many readers, as do I, feel the stress of such an existence? Nevertheless, it brings fulfilment—a human state different to happiness It is fascinating to reflect upon how the leaders and partici-pants in that first Renaissance found the means to bring together science, philoso-phy, artistic endeavour and creativity, enabling individuals and groups to enjoin and converge in ways we still find difficult to achieve today

It is true that we do live in an ‘Age of Convergence’—not least the convergence

of technologies such as information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology (as examples) There are elements beyond synergy relating to some of these modern day opportunities for convergence Symbiosis can be demonstrated in the business world, where we find large corporations able to exist only in a symbiotic relation-ship with smaller, highly specialized partners who enjoy equally the symbiotic state

As one who spent a large number of years climbing the greasy pole in a large tinational corporation, I appreciate, in a seriously emotional way, the movements

mul-we have seen away from hierarchies towards networked relationships, offering opportunities for so much more individual creative space In the narrative describing

1 Fab Labs are purpose-built digital fabrication and rapid prototyping workspaces that have been, and are being, set up across the globe See, for example, http://www.fablablondon.org/about/

those early centuries, connectivity, convergence, confluence, co-creation and laboration are seen to have been embedded in developing practices, behaviours and culture Jim Collins is quoted with the statement—‘Great vision without great peo-ple is irrelevant’; and throughout the text it is indeed inspiring to see that people are the key factor, lying at the heart of real progress.

col-Piero refers to the Renaissance as

…a long thread stretched across centuries: from the earlier European Renaissance in the Middle Ages to Japan of the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868); the Timurid Renaissance and then the Bengali Renaissance of the Indian subcontinent, from which arose personalities such as the scientist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974); the American Renaissance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century; and from the ‘New Culture Movement’ which began in 1917 up to the present day, with the Chinese Renaissance taking place after centu- ries of oblivion in the Middle Kingdom.

Elsewhere, Piero elaborates on many of the entrepreneurial elements and effects

of much earlier aspects of Chinese history—all the way back to the days of nings of the Silk Road His proposition for the future is that, ‘Today’s artistic and cultural upheavals in human and physical sciences herald a new Renaissance, which could both affect and blend with entrepreneurship’ I agree, and in this regard I love the term I have shamelessly stolen from the text: ‘Entreprenaissance’

begin-Education, world population growth and demographics are matters of great importance to us all The challenges of climate change, food security, water supplies and the effects of industrialization and globalization are the subject of volumes of commentary and predictions The content of some of the chapters in the book pro-vides information and insights and should foster aspirations for success as we mere mortals strive to meet these great challenges of our times—not to mention security issues, wars and other man-made problems Some chapters deal specifically with education; and some in part with the effects and implications of rapid urbanization

So much of what we entrepreneurs might bring as contributions to how the world deals with the challenges and opportunities in these subject areas will depend on our success in helping the establishment, and indeed embedding, of positive mindsets The vision of a world where, in theory, everyone might one day soon be connected with everyone encourages some of us to urge our students and young entrepreneurs

to think seriously about the concept and practice of ‘A World Without Borders’—mindsets of international entrepreneurial thinking An attitude of ‘Why Not?’ rather than ‘Yes, But’

Entrepreneurial education in a practical sense, as described in some of these pages, and transformational education in the universities of the twenty-first century, where the principle is student-centric learning—not teacher-centric activity—and where students and alumni become much more often the leaders and trendsetters, and where the university is the centre point and fountain of inspiration for the whole community, are already with us in growing numbers of centres around the world The ‘LbD’ approaches—‘Learning by Developing’ being championed in universi-ties in Finland and elsewhere at all levels of education, and from day 1—are indeed

a throwback to the Renaissance and to the variety of educational processes that produced great minds and great change-makers during those Renaissance days

The  capacity for mass learning and super-connectivity creates opportunities for education and mentor support to reach places and people previously inaccessible The workshops, design factories, Fab Labs and IdeaSpaces will flourish The com-ments in one perceptive chapter here about the failure of business schools in general contribute to the creation of more successful entrepreneurs and more new busi-nesses are well made Those business schools which will hold prime positions in the future are emerging, taking note and finding new ways of connecting themselves to the mainstream of learning The narrative describing the EDEN Centre for Entrepreneurship and Design Innovation at Maynooth University in Ireland is truly exciting.

I must put my finger on one concern that I have when I look around me today and ask the question: ‘Are we doing as well in education and the emergence and devel-opment of new enterprises as in the early Renaissance when it comes to connecting and embracing the creative areas and creative industries?’ My sense, perhaps clouded by my technological education and living in Cambridge, one of the great technology clusters of the modern world, is that more could be done to bring art, design, literature and the creative industries further into the mainstream of the new renaissance

The sub-title of the book is ‘Cities striving towards an era of rebirth and revival’ There have been predications that by 2035 cities—or urban areas altogether—will

be home to 70% of the world’s people Between 2004 and 2014 the proportion of

we humans living in urban areas grew from 41 to 53% In Asia the growth was from

38 to 54% In China as many as 350,000 people a day have been moving from try to town for prolonged periods This of course places many stresses on many points But there are ‘cities and cities’ I was recently in the megacity of Chengdu in China, having a population of some 15 million but still some way distant from Chongqing which has a population of 31 million (Beijing has a mere 23 million)

coun-My home city of Cambridge has a population of about 120,000; and yet Cambridge,

by developing a joined-up entrepreneurial ecosystem over the past 60 years, with an 800-year-old university at its centre, has produced Europe’s fastest growing regional economy, the biggest cluster of hi-tech bioscience companies in Europe and 15 companies that grew within 25 years to be valued each at more than $US1 billion The largest is worth $US25 billion Moreover, it is not that money has been the main measure: 60,000 new jobs have been created and a community of enterprise, com-mon purpose and social inclusion has been sustained—with a great deal of foreign, inward direct investment

The culture and atmosphere are decidedly ‘new renaissance’: active networks, open innovation and collaboration Small can be more than just beautiful So, cities are ‘not just cities’; but communities are, however, communities From all that I have read, the Renaissance was spawned in places where communities of common purpose were formed and flourished How then can China and its megacities deal with the opportunities and challenges? I found the answer from an example, in mid-

2016, in Chengdu: Chinese cities, not unnaturally, have districts and towns

A real-life example is Jingrong Town, in Pixian County Chengdu: the town has one million inhabitants The Chinese central government has designated 17 such

towns as entrepreneur centres and central funds have been dispensed accordingly Some of us are working with Pixian to assist the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem there Here is an extract from a government document describing what is taking place It is an interesting example of focus and essentially ‘downscaling’ to create a practical model in a large metropolis.

Jingrong Town is located in Deyuan Town of Pixian County, Chengdu The name Jing means ‘young people’ With the instruction and support of Pixian County Peoples Government, Jingrong Town is a paradise for young people to start business, and an accel- erator for the establishment of the new image of Chengdu—City of Business Starting and Dream Fulfilling Jingrong Town will serve as a bridge to help all talents with dream, faith and pursuit to succeed.

Note the poetic language China is big on dreams and visions Pixian County has

19 universities, now focussed more on entrepreneurial education, and the Mayor of Pixian proudly announced recently that ‘there are 925 entrepreneurial programmes now installed’ Furthermore, in case it is suggested that the emerging companies may be of a boring old-economy nature, quoting again from the Jingrong notes we see Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, E-Commerce and Biotechnology listed.China’s ‘entreprenaissance’ is taking place in many locations not well known in the West—or not known at all to those not going there Piero writes of ‘Cities striv-ing towards an era of renaissance and revival’: nowhere more so than in China The true extent of the contribution of Ancient China to the first great age of inventive-ness and outreach, described in part in the opening chapter here, is exhaustively researched and reported in ‘The Silk Roads—A New History of the World’ by Peter Frankopan.2

My hope is that this present book will stimulate more deep thoughts and interest, and indeed actions, which support the evolution of a new renaissance Confucius made the point about the importance of understanding history as we look ahead to the future: ‘Study the past if you would define the future’ This will be the age not just of connectivity: there will be meta-connectors in abundance But in a world where we will see far greater convergence of artificial intelligence, machine learn-ing, genetics put to use, robotics and more, perhaps ‘connectricity—creating the currents that determine the future’—is a better state to seek

On a positive concluding note, I expressed above the view that ‘hope will lead to action or actions’ On reflection, it would be better to reverse the action words and agree that ‘action leads to hope’

Alan Barrell

2 Frankopan P (2015) The Silk Roads—A New History of the World London: Bloomsbury.

Editor’s Note and Acknowledgements

The intent of this book is to create a bridge between the Renaissance of the period between the second half of the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries and the pres-ent, insurgent renaissance: a bridge that creates an ideal connection between the Renaissance entrepreneurship of that time and the new one of the current time.The first Renaissance, conceived and developed in an urban environment, with the Medici family in Florence as pioneers, was a melting pot of art, culture, science and technology It is in that context that entrepreneurship—with an artisan matrix and, hence, customized—was born, to meet the demands and anticipate the needs of individual consumers

With the coming of the mechanical technologies of the first industrial revolution, art, culture and science have become divorced from entrepreneurship The latter took on Fordist features, resulting in depersonalization and, therefore, standardiza-tion of the producer–consumer relationship The present renaissance entrepreneur-ship returns to the ideals of customization—thanks, for example, to the coupling of 3D printing technologies and a sharing/on-demand economy—strongly linked to the sequence ‘art–culture–science–technology’

The metaphorical road to a new entrepreneurial renaissance is travelled by cities having creative communities These communities actively participate in the mobil-ity of international talent, promoting connections between the knowledge nomads who move around the world and other talents to whom the cities address their atten-tion with a view to being recognized as the final destination of their wanderings (‘come here and stay’)

Against the background highlighted in the introductory chapter, authors from various cultural roots, different countries and continents paint the picture from the perspective of their cities They offer stories that are having a major effect, like a renaissance, on the development of the cities of their narratives Brought back to life

in the different conditions of the current age, sewing together pieces of art, culture, science, technology and entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial renaissance gives cities renewed identity and pride

In conceiving a publishing project for a new entrepreneurial renaissance, I drew inspiration from the interweaving of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences

that characterizes the University of Maynooth Founded in 1997, the University is both the youngest and one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Ireland, tracing its origins to the foundation of the Royal College of St Patrick in 1795 It was there that Father Nicholas Joseph Callan (1799–1864), professor of natural philosophy, demonstrated the transmission and reception of electrical energy with-out wires with a device that is now known as the electrical transformer Professor Callan is best known for his work on the induction coil and for having built, at the time, the world’s largest battery: his work contributed to the fertility of innovative entrepreneurship during the Industrial Revolution Discoveries, inventions and innovations have flourished in hybrid contexts such as the College of St Patrick where an invisible thread tied together theology, philosophy, art and science—a legacy that the University of Maynooth has renewed, enriching it with new contents.

I would like to record my special thanks to all of those who have accepted my call, offering evidence of the interesting times, informed by the renaissance spirit in which we live In many different ways all of these people have enriched the book with their ingenuity

Thanks are due, too, to John Edmondson and Tim Feest for their extremely able contribution to the editing, including further background research

valu-A special debt of gratitude is owed to Philip Nolan, President of the National University of Ireland (NUI) in Maynooth, and Ray O’Neill, Vice President for Innovation, for their active support and encouragement Last, but not least, I am grateful to Martin Curley, co-founder of the Innovation Value Institute and my com-panion of adventure along the path of research in the discovery of unknown unknowns, unencumbered by presumption and preconceptions

Postscript: Dr Debra Amidon passed away on 13 August 2016 She was one of the original architects of the knowledge economy and founder of ENTOVATION International, a global innovation research and consulting network We are very indebted to Debra for advising us in drafting the project that has inspired this book Her pioneering spirit will stay with us always

1 Scope of the Renaissance 1

Piero Formica

2 Harbouring the City of Sydney’s Fluid Renaissance:

Incorporating Community, Creativity and Collaboration 47

Kim Chandler McDonald

3 Bangalore: Development Through Intercultural Interaction 57

Mathew J Manimala

4 Tel Aviv: A Renaissance Revival in the Making 81

Edna Pasher, Guy Pross, Uri Kushnir, and Yarden Neeman

5 From Self-Made Entrepreneurs to the Sharing Economy:

Milan as a Laboratory for a New Collaboration-Based Approach 89

Contributors

Kildare, Ireland

City Topics, Genova, Italy

Bangalore, India

Enterprise Advisory Board, Sydney, NSW, Australia

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

P Formica (ed.), Entrepreneurial Renaissance, Innovation, Technology, and

Knowledge Management, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52660-7_1

Scope of the Renaissance

Piero Formica

… the human spirit since the Renaissance…has consisted and continues all the time to consist mainly, not in the discovery of positive truths, but substantially of negative ones It consists, in other words, in knowing the falsity of what in the more or less distant past was thought to be certain…

Giacomo Leopardi: Zibaldone (The Notebooks) (Leopardi 2013 )

Since the Renaissance, a concept called ‘progress’ has been baked into our society Progress—founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case

of science, through experiment) To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it That’s what separates us from the beasts.

Seth Shostak, US astronomer (Shostak 2012 )

At the dawn of the Renaissance there was a strong sense of living in the end of days Obscured by the shadow of the Middle Ages, the desire for a renewed identity, shaped by both humanitarian and scientific learning, was in its infancy Artists and scientists began the work of dismantling everything that for centuries had been taken for granted The Italian Renaissance contributed significantly to breaking down the boundaries—those of ideas as well as those of geography or demarcated

by political power The new entrepreneurship coming into force in Medici Florence,

in Venice under the Doges and in Milan dominated by Ludovico il Moro, taking place as a result of advances in the textile industry and in the wake of the Italian Renaissance, extended beyond geographical and political borders and found profit-able links with Flanders and, therefore, with the Renaissance in the Low Countries (corresponding roughly to the present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg)

It was in Flanders that the innovator and influential cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) depicted the ‘outside’ world—that world beyond normal individual experience which had until then been hidden from view—thus paving the way for long-distance exchanges

P Formica ( * )

Innovation Value Institute, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

e-mail: piero.formica@gmail.com

The Renaissance has been a long thread stretched across centuries: from the earlier European Renaissance of the Middle Ages to the Japan of the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868); the Timurid Renaissance and then the Bengali Renaissance on the Indian subcontinent, from which arose personalities such as the scientist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974); the American Renaissance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and from the ‘New Culture Movement’, which began in 1917, up to the present day, with the Chinese Renaissance taking place after centuries of oblivion of the Middle Kingdom.

Today’s artistic and cultural upheavals in human and physical sciences herald a new renaissance, which could both affect and blend with entrepreneurship

1 Entrepreneurial Renaissance

Dream, explore, and discover: three distinctive features of a cultural movement referred to as ‘Innovative Entrepreneurship’ It is a movement brought about by virulent epidemics of innovation, which was as rife in the Renaissance as it was dur-ing the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in China, the Dutch Golden Age (1568–1648), and in Britain in 1651–1851—to name but three epochs which experienced magic moments of the accelerated tempo of innovation

The Renaissance put knowledge at the heart of value creation, which occurred in the workshops of artisans and artists Here, painters, sculptors and other artists met and worked together; as did architects, mathematicians, engineers, anatomists, other scientists and rich merchants acting as patrons All of them gave form and life to Renaissance communities, generators of aesthetic and expressive as well as social and economic values The result was entrepreneurship that conceived revolutionary ways of working, of designing and delivering products and services, and of seeing the world In short, here was a spark of prosperity characterized by discontinuity.Although inclined to absorb the innovative content of past ages, every rebirth shows signs of discontinuity with the past Discontinuity reverses the sequence between what was and what will be In the logic of continuity, there is no future without a past The route to the future is outlined and conditioned by events that have already happened In the sign of discontinuity, there is no past without a future The future marks out and traces its own path independently, taking from past events what it deems appropriate for its construction Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Capitalism (in its various forms—corporate, molecular, family, etc.): these are stages of transformative social and productive structures brought about by discontinuity

Analysing the unfolding of social and economic conditions, researchers and entists at the Santa Fe Institute (www.santafe.edu) re-proposed the ever-increasing role of knowledge in order to grow and combine the ‘well-having’ and well-being

sci-of individuals and their communities Equally, many years have now passed since Peter Drucker (1909–2005), the forerunner of modern management, advocated that,

‘knowledge may come to occupy the place in the politics of the knowledge-based

society which property and income occupied over the three centuries that we have come to call the age of capitalism’ (quoted in Kilpi 2011).

Countries and cities where policy makers are keen to usher in a renewed age of entrepreneurial renaissance are facing the maturity stage of the GDP life cycle—the yardstick of a country’s economic performance Studies on human capital initiated

in the 1960s by Gary Becker (1930–2014), Nobel Laureate in Economics, had already cast a shadow over this monetary measure of the value of a country’s overall output of goods and services The entrepreneurial renaissance rewards specific qual-ities—for example, the contribution (the productivity) each employee brings to the team to which they belong—rather than numerical quantities (e.g., number of staff and hours worked)

In the framework of the entrepreneurial renaissance, value creation occurs in the crucible of dialogue, and then through interactions between interdependent people Here is the cause of the prominence of disciplines at the convergence of the sci-ences—from econo-physics, which studies the cognitive flows and collisions of ideas within and between renaissance communities toward which stakeholders from different disciplines converge and integrate, to neuro-economics, which examines the human mind in relation to decision-making processes for the implementation of new solutions with regard to specific tasks to be carried out

2 In Search of Shared Prosperity

In the games played on the innovation field, it may happen that the winner takes all The market power of the new monopolist can cause severe disparities in the distri-bution of income and wealth Growing inequalities occur not only between indi-viduals; businesses are also affected Those among them who raise high monopolistic barriers can enjoy returns on investment several times higher than the median val-ues As epicentres of value creation, cities are faced with a narrow path traced by innovation between progress and inequality, leading to the question: how to follow such a path? In the wake of Schumpeter, perhaps they should not worry about the new monopolies, whose strength might decline in the face of strong pressure from potential competitors determined to enter the most promising emerging markets The best strategy might therefore be to let the market take its course What, then, if the monopoly-derived profits of the incumbents withstand the attacks? In short, what if the markets are not as efficient and equitable as one might expect?

It is the different levels of government coming into the field, acting as referees, that we usually observe On the front line in the battle against monopolistic powers, seeking to ensure economic democracy in the urban ecosystem of innovation, what motivations drive the behaviours of local administrators taking on the roles of refer-ees? Does the answer lie in the simulation and the personal interest of the prince, or other, manifestly opposed, motivations? In the style of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), the referee must strive to possess, together with firmness, the qualities of honesty, loyalty and a sense of fair play

This is not to say, however, that appearance necessarily matches reality What is true for product and service markets is no less true in the political market where the prince, in the role of referee, can act for his own personal gain (what Guicciardini

called ‘particulare’) and so build a political monopoly, presaging disparities among

people as well as among companies Conversely, those referees who do not seek to achieve and maintain monopoly power, or the praise of the crowd through the mere appearance of their actions, seem determined to umpire properly in the field of inno-vation in order to pursue a shared prosperity and to provide opportunities that will not be stifled by entrenched monopoly power

There will be cities that will give shape to the kind of public intervention which helps improve the lives of ordinary people, their families and communities, and thus will lay the foundations for innovative entrepreneurship which upholds the values of economic democracy against a new age of unbeatable monopoly These cities will merit the epithet ‘renaissance’

3 Connected Cities

The history books tell of cities subjected to movements that generated connectivity among them Newly encountered lands are harbingers of commonality between peoples of diverse cultures In the Middle Ages, connected by trade and cultural currents that spread from East to West, the protagonists were the Mediterranean cit-ies, as shown in the left-hand part of Fig. 1.1 Intellectual movements and entrepre-neurial activities incubated and developed in the Islamic world were propagated in the West Muslim Spain would play a key role in the evolution of science From around the world of that time, researchers and students came together in Cordoba

It is connectivity that gives high status to a city

Renaissance Florence is a strategic location at the crossroads of connectivity Richard Goldthwaite (2009), eminent historian of the Florentine economy, has traced the connections whose origin lies in the markets of raw materials, manufac-tured products, credit and art The Florentine merchants imported fine wool that was used to produce high-quality textile products Starting from Bardi and Peruzzi, its leading bankers since the Middle Ages, the banking industry stretched up to the north, connecting with Antwerp in the Low Countries With Antwerp and Bruges, Florence strengthened its connections in the art market With the opening of new trade routes after the discovery of America, port cities bordering the Atlantic Ocean were engaged in building connected networks to the west To the east, by means of land and sea routes, cross-cultural and trade relations wound their way through Venice and the Persian, Indian and Chinese cities imbued with the Renaissance spirit Relations may have arisen in China, as suggested by Gavin Menzies (2008), for whom ‘the transfer of Chinese intellectual capital was the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze’

Since World War II, connectivity has blossomed in all directions Encounters arise from a commonality of purpose rather than the geographical proximity of

Fig

cities Political choices and openings that favour free trade as well as the growth of intellectual, entrepreneurial and financial capital without borders initiated the age of small-scale globalization which matured into large-scale globalization The latter is characterized by the increasing propensity to international mobility of talents—among them aspiring and new entrepreneurs—and this is now contributing strongly such that the connected cities present the image of a single and dense network with many loops and knots (see the right-hand part of Fig. 1.1).

Human capital is among the factors that most influence the location choices for founders of start-up ventures According to Startup Heatmap Europe 2016 (www.startupheatmap.eu), access to highly qualified talents is relevant, or very relevant, to the highest number of founders, with 23% of them having started their company outside their country of origin The probability that founders of start-ups will move across national borders is five times higher than the average rate for European Union citizens Cities where the two currents of talents and founders intersect become hubs of connectivity

4 Cities on the Cusp of an Entrepreneurial Renaissance

The ideas generated during the Renaissance formed an inextricable tangle of tic, scientific and technical inventions, and accumulation of capital in the cities In a climate open to new ideas, plentiful sources of experimentation and innovation, cities became important and wealthy artistic and entrepreneurial centres

artis-The name of the future of cities is ‘Transformative Entrepreneurship’, to which

‘Renaissance’ should be added The first half of the current century is experiencing

an accelerated movement of rural populations to cities In the age of worldwide mobility, fast-movers are those talents attracted by the research centres and labora-tories of academia and industry located in cities, as well as by the opportunities to exploit the results of their investigations offered by the multiple connections among the leading protagonists who crowd the city However, it is not only the talents who flock in large numbers to cities The movement is much broader, engaging the different layers of a world population looking for opportunities that take shape in cities, which then become locations for the design and implementation of innovative approaches in social and economic fields What really meets the needs of old and new citizens is the entrepreneurial culture that arises from the adoption of a behaviour that provides effective answers to scientific, technological and human dilemmas This culture is synonymous with a new life, a renaissance, which gives to each city

a unique conceptual imprint

From education to science and entrepreneurship, the intangible factors of vation are the central engine of that human change that is a renaissance In the cities

inno-of a new entrepreneurial renaissance, the frontier inno-of human knowledge is dynamic, always moving forward The government of ideas springing from human creativ-ity—the ‘ideocracy’—generates projects that create a demand for knowledge-based activities: from intuitive knowledge to knowledge along the two directions of

induction and deduction According to a holistic and organic view of the city, it is the common weal—and therefore the prosperity of the community—that is the goal

to achieve

As with the English polymath Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in renaissance cities the figure of the scientific leader of new industry moves into prominence, relying heavily on science to manufacture different and higher-quality products than those

of the Industrial Age Also emerging onto the scene are ‘political entrepreneurs’ and

‘public entrepreneurs’—characters whose names were coined by Galal and De Haas (2016) The former channel their renaissance vision into innovative strategies which are pursued by the latter—individuals or public sector organizations with a mission

to increase the absorptive capacity of innovation

Building upon these features, borrowed from the canon of renaissance ics outlined by Reinert and Daastøl (2004), the entire body of entrepreneurship rises

econom-to new life with more entrepreneurs and creaeconom-tors of innovative businesses who, bringing abundance, instil optimism in the cities that nurture them

5 Revival of Education

Education is the precondition of any expectation about what can be achieved row With regard to actively responding to the intermingling of technological and social changes with strong economic implications, the values, attitudes and behav-iours of the school system are under pressure from irreversible transformations At stake is the formation of the twenty-first century ‘renaissance man’, who, like his ancestor of the Renaissance, must be able to excel in different activities, performing

tomor-a vtomor-ariety of ttomor-asks.1 The new renaissance man is aware that the breadth and atic nature of knowledge poses problems of such scale that decisive actions are required by people willing to establish meaningful relationships; relationships born out of passionate conversations that create emotional as well as intellectual connec-tions These are the people who shape the new renaissance communities

system-The new entrepreneurial renaissance flowers from learner-centred education The fifteenth century Renaissance was a time of learning, marked by humanists gathered at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492).2 Educators conceived innovative ways of understanding education, breaking revolutionary paths and mov-ing away from the then dominant teaching orthodoxy

In a report from Tokyo in February 1990, the Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani wrote about Japanese education:

1 ‘Renaissance man’ is a term coined to describe ‘a cultured man of the Renaissance who was knowledgeable, educated, or proficient in a wide range of fields’ (see http://www.dictionary.com/ browse/renaissance-man ) Of course, in our present, more enlightened times, ‘man’ could be

‘woman’: for convenience and simplicity, we will use the original phrase on the basis that it can refer equally to a Renaissance woman.

2 The Medici were the famous dynasty of bankers and rulers of Florence.

At school the child is not used to think for itself, but is trained to say the right thing at the right time For each question there is an answer and that must be learned by heart

‘What happens when the snow melts?’—asks the teacher—and the entire class, in rus, has to answer, ‘It becomes water’ If one says, ‘Spring is coming!’, one is reproached (Terzani 1998 )

cho-From another perspective, the neuroscientist Stuart J Firestein, Director of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, observed:

I began to sense that the students must have had the impression that pretty much everything

is known in neuroscience This couldn’t be more wrong I had, by teaching this course gently, given these students the idea that science is an accumulation of facts Also not true When I sit down with colleagues over a beer in meetings, we do not go over the facts, we

dili-do not talk about what’s known; we talk about what we’d like to figure out, about what needs to be done (Firestein 2012 )

The Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) ered that the development of understanding through students’ conversations with each other and with their teachers was far more important than the process of mem-orizing required at many religious schools of the Middle Ages In the wake of Erasmus, the Moravian educator John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) suggested teachers should exploit the sensitivity, and therefore the feeling, of students rather than merely accepting their ability to memorize Equally, learning through con-versation, according to the English philosopher and physician John Locke (1632–1704), had to be at the centre of the school curriculum

consid-In the early twentieth century, the Italian writer Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) spoke against the school that ‘…does not invent knowledge but prides itself on transmitting it’ (Papini 1919), and shifted the emphasis from teaching that takes students from giving the right answer to learning in experimental laboratories which provide a basis for raising, by both students and teachers, unspoken and unprece-dented questions, and learning from errors

Around the time of Papini, on the North American side of the Atlantic, the cational reformer John Dewey (1859–1952) ranked an unusual subject among the protagonists of education: ignorance, which he featured as ‘genuine’ Ignorance could be profitable when accompanied by humility, curiosity and open-mindedness (Dewey 1933) As well as being genuine, this type of ignorance spawns new ideas The knowledge gained is the equivalent of the medieval ‘Finis Terrae’ Over and beyond the visible horizon of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ there is the unknown conti-nent—what you do not know, and you don’t know that you don’t know As the neuroscientist Firestein claimed, to overcome the limits of the known requires an ability to remain in the mystery and the unknown, which, to adopt a saying of Confucius, can be likened ‘to finding a black cat in a dark room, especially if there

edu-is no cat’ Hence Firestein’s idea ‘…for an entire course devoted to, and titled, Ignorance A science course [….] in which a guest scientist talks to a group of stu-dents for a couple of hours about what he or she doesn’t know’ (Firestein 2012).Ignorance is not a barrier to action The learning arising from creative ignorance

is a journey that starts when you turn off the certainty of the light of the day, ing in the dark night of unmeasurable uncertainty What will happen along the way

advanc-towards the future you will discover en route, as part of the redoing and inventing processes Living in the certainty of uncertainty, embracing creative ignorance, looking ahead, dealing with the unpredictable: this is how new paths are made (not found!), by walking in new directions in science, art and culture, and, not least,

in entrepreneurship that draws nourishment from them That is precisely what characterized the Renaissance Age

A new entrepreneurial renaissance, then, is the result of a deviation from tional teaching patterns Deviations could be texts, essays, articles and courses focused on ignorance, which enrich both the literature and learning practices.3 They come into conflict with knowledge maps and mental structures so far mastered

tradi-6 Language Skills for the Entrepreneurial Renaissance

Intangible assets are under the spotlight in cities that promote entrepreneurial renaissance From its logo to its artistic assets and corporate brands, the city com-municates its excellence by relying on language skills to raise the productivity and competitiveness of the economy The English language is the natural choice for communications, having achieved primacy as a communication medium for competing in international markets, creating businesses and interacting in digital networks

The fortunes of a language can be traced in the ecology of the species that inhabit

a community From an economic point of view, growth fuelled by discoveries, inventions and innovations results in successful, universally recognized, entrepre-neurial species whose popularity spreads the use of their language worldwide The ecology of the species born from the Internet has been instrumental in promoting the supremacy of English The economic growth fuelled by the status of English as

the lingua franca eliminates the use of an increasing number of words in a language

different from the dominant one, with the non-dominant language eventually ering away to such an extent as to run the risk of marginalization and disappearance

with-It is thought that this is a worldwide phenomenon, which is estimated to be atically affecting 7000 known languages (Underwood 2014)

system-The above scenario neglects the metaphorical underground rivers that ize the geography of languages One of these is culture, which is more meaningful than the symbols and emotions evoked by the successful entrepreneurial species

character-In particular, plunging into the depths of classical cultures and their languages helps

to extend the scope of imagination that creativity will put into action This is the case for Latin which, at least in Western civilization, is notably re-emerging at the surface

3 With regard to the literature, by way of illustration we cite, in addition to Stuart J Firestein, Smithson ( 1989 ), Mark Forsyth ( 2014 ), Gross and McGoey ( 2015 ), Formica ( 2014 ); and Holmes ( 2015 ) With reference to learning practices, there are courses designed by the surgeon Marlys H Witte, the sociologist Michael Smithson and Stuart J Firestein, and the present author.

Between the Renaissance and the present day, two technologies have been added

to the process of communication As well as being oral, written and printed, munication has benefitted, first, from the transition to electricity and, second, from the digital revolution Today, communication through digital networks helps us to locate experts, partners and customers more readily and to identify prevalent trends, and, then, to seize opportunities offered by emerging trends At the time of Gutenberg

com-Latin was the lingua franca in movable-type printing In the second renaissance,

digital dexterity speaks English Yet, Latin is rising to new life

The revival of Latin was noted by The Economist on 27 July 2013: ‘A dead

lan-guage is alive and kicking online and on the airwaves’ Here are just some of the facts which, according to this weekly magazine, clearly highlight the resurrection of the Latin language:

• Turning back to the Classical Lyceum of Tampere, founded in 1901, whose tion continues with the Classical School in which the study of the Latin civiliza-tion and language is still one of its hallmarks, Finland’s YLE Radio 1 has, since

tradi-1 September tradi-1989, broadcast a programme in classical Latin called Nuntii Latini,

with listeners in over 80 countries

• Similarly, Radio Bremen in Germany has broadcast a programme called Nuntii

Latini Septimanales since 2001

• Google Translate provides a service in Latin which attracts a larger number of users than Esperanto

• In 2004, a Polish journalist started Ephemeris, an online journal in Latin, with contributors in Germany, Colombia, Chile and the United States

• Schola is a social network in Latin, operational since 2008 Launched by Benedict

XVI on Twitter in January 2013, the account Pontifex Latin records hundreds of

thousands of followers According to David Butterfield, a Latin scholar at the University of Cambridge, Latin is ideal for those who want to post 140 characters

on Twitter; as Butterfield says, ‘Five Latin words can often say more than ten English ones’

• Google and Facebook offer users a Latin-language setting (Fig. 1.2)

Fig 1.2

Different forces are at play in favour of ‘Latin lovers’, revitalizing this language that was universal during the Renaissance Among these forces, the imagination is what we want to emphasize here In the second renaissance, the mass production of material goods using pioneering engineering technology is giving way to the pro-duction of a mass of ideas with the support of digital technologies Imagination is not only a source of ideas; it also acts to combine ideas in different ways, some of which bloom in the garden of a renewed entrepreneurial renaissance.

Faced with Latin or other dead languages, we trigger a cultural process that brings us back to the origins of civilization Symbols, metaphors and concepts that are the baggage of our tacit knowledge come to light in our memory It is from here that the imagination draws its lifeblood, broadening its horizons so as to be induced

to interact with others who are bearers of other cultures Exposed to digital nologies, we realize that technology alone is not enough and that alone we can do little Just as Steve Jobs imagined, we are ready to engage in a learning process to

tech-combine technology with the liberal arts; technologists with humanists Alienus non

Diutius, alone no longer, is the Latin motto of Pixar University, which has lated the lessons of Jobs On the same wavelength, the Trivium University Centre in Tampere, Finland, which opened in January 2015, derives its name from the Latin

assimi-word trivium, the meeting point of three roads The University Centre has as its

mis-sion the encouragement of cross-disciplinary dialogue and the promotion of eval and Renaissance cultures Furthermore, the EF EPI, the largest international report on English proficiency, ranks Finland highly with regard to mastery of that language.4 Technological culture and classical culture, English and Latin: this is the couple that contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of the engine that drives the new renaissance entrepreneurship

medi-7 Renaissance Horizons

Is the aspiration of our age—the new age of knowledge with its high-powered preneurial impact—as bold as that of the young Lorenzo de’ Medici who, in 1469, called for a renewal that would be a transformative rather than an adaptive change?

entre-Can we make ours Lorenzo’s broncone (stump) of laurel with the motto ‘Le temps revient’, recalling the passage of the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil ‘redeunt Saturnia

regna…surget gens aurea Mundo’ (The reign of Saturn is returning… a golden race arises throughout the whole Earth)? Can we say that this new age of knowledge is

the viaticum, our supply of provisions and money, for a journey towards the ideal

golden age? Has the recent past been the Middle Ages of our times which has left unresolved problems deemed insoluble but which, on the contrary, we can solve in the near future?

4 EF EPI is the Education First English Proficiency Index See: http://www.ef.co.uk/epi/

We can make several assumptions, the occurrence of which leads to positive answers to the above questions The objective scientific sense is challenged by uncertainty and inconsistency as fundamental traits of nature The observation of facts that clash with each other and the art of cultivating simultaneously oppos-ing and even vague ideas—improvising, complying with contradictions, putting together logic and intuition and exploiting inexperience—these are mindsets that are oblique, and they therefore proceed along a path full of twists and turns This winding road leads to the creation of entirely new things rather than just improve-ments of existing ones The obliquity, which affected so many writers and artists

of the Renaissance, was embodied in the mythological figure of Hermes, the Olympian god who held several roles, simultaneously travelling in different directions Subsequently, the oblique approach was a favourite subject of Francis Bacon, whose thinking today’s policy makers should recover to regenerate the art of politics, which currently favours the narrow and linear road of a planned evolution

Asked by Pope Julius II (1443–1513) to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475/1518–1564) at first replied that, being a sculptor and not a painter, he lacked experience to use the fresco tech-nique He therefore did not want to accept the assignment If there is something deep and meaningful which subsequently prompted Michelangelo to accept the task—well, that ‘something’ can be found in the folds of inexperience We believe

it is the ‘not knowing of not knowing’ that causes revolutionary innovators to engage themselves in a thorough effort; and their aim is to seek solutions ‘outside the box’,

in order to break from the dominant tradition

Thus the revolutionary innovator passes over the visible horizon (Horizon 1)

full of information directed at distant, not perceptible goals (Horizons 2, 3…n)

Applicable to Horizon 1, the rules dictated by experience are no longer suitable for reuse once a journey of exploration to far-off horizons begins This is where creative ignorance comes into play—after, not before, knowledge—and unlocks otherwise unthinkable paths of economic growth and social development (Formica 2014) With its charge of nạveté, creative ignorance discovers or even invents a new world, causing permanent damage to the world that complies with experience

A close observation of Michelangelo allows one to recognize in oneself that

‘swell kid’ so vividly represented by the American writer J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)

in his novel The Catcher in the Rye:

The kid was swell He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next

to the curb He was making out like he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing He was singing that song, ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye’

He had a pretty little voice, too He was just singing for the hell of it, you could tell The cars zoomed by, brakes screeched all over the place, his parents paid no attention to him, and he kept on walking next to the curb and singing ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye’ It made me feel better It made me feel not so depressed any more (Salinger 1951 )

8 ‘Renaissance’ Ideas

Intuition that, as Einstein said, is a sacred gift; imagination that begins with ition; creativity that thrives when life and the surrounding environment are far from perfect; rewards for creative people; investments in new ideas that challenge the power of the Pope and sovereign rulers, that give impetus to science and birth to the new class of merchant creators of wealth; the many questions that stand out in the societal context and exceed the answers; freedom from formal education with its teaching kit, examinations and specializations that stifle intuition and imagination; the powers of observation unencumbered by preconceived assumptions and expec-

intu-tations; the bottega (workshop), the place where talents are nurtured, new

tech-niques are at work and new artistic forms come to light; artists competing among themselves, but also ready to work together: all this and much more is what has been called ‘renaissance’

Ideas awaken the world; they do it as if being reborn They are, in short, sance’ ideas ‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the

‘renais-world’—so said the late Robin Williams, the great actor, in the movie Dead Poets’

Society (1989) Further to his seminal work of 1986, 3 years before that movie was released, the economist Paul Romer explained that due to the non-rivalry of ideas—the fact, that is, that one person’s use of an idea does not prevent others from making another use of it—innovations that arise from them enable the economy to be freed from the chains of the law of diminishing returns (doubling the input, the change in output is less than proportional)

By exploiting ideas, increasing returns (additional production inputs yield more than proportionate returns) change the economic world for the better because they raise material living standards Hence, ideas, not objects, make the world move The world is no longer caught between scarcity of resources and limits to growth On the contrary, it is a playground for almost unlimited opportunities, where new ideas cre-ate new products, new markets and new possibilities for generating wealth This is especially true in our present time, as access costs to knowledge dependent on tech-nology are declining thanks to social media, digital services and applications for smartphones What remain unchanged are the material and social costs related to the governance of education and educational processes that inhibit the emergence of new ideas, not allowing learners to gain access to sources of ‘renaissance thinking’ such as failure and creative ignorance

There are periods in human history in which ideas, culturally very different from each other, look like threads to be woven into stories and projects that have a major impact on the social and economic fabric Meeting people from diverse back-grounds, engaging in new and more effective dialogues, and also clashing—the intersection of artistic, scientific, business and policy ideas is the outcome of the creative process dubbed ‘ideation’ This process was triggered by the social phe-nomenon that Frans Johansson (2004) called the ‘Medici effect’, revisiting the driv-ing force of across-the-board innovation attributed to the Medici In fact, in the Florence of the Medici ideation performs the whole cycle: from the generation of

the idea to its realization which, as Romer would say, comes in the guise of a recipe better than those hitherto produced.5

The Medici-inspired Renaissance shows the importance of the role of the city leaders—the aristocrats of that time—in outlining new trends and discovering tal-ents whose original ideas would result in recipes for a better world We live now in

a time when the great migrations combined with the international mobility of the knowledge nomads anticipate a future in pursuit of the primacy of cities where, it is forecast, the majority of the world population will be concentrated by 2050 It seems that the appearance over the horizon of a phenomenon comparable to that which spread from Florence to the urban centres of Europe in the time of the Medici once again depends on the quality of local elites and leaders

Cities aspiring to breathe the crisp, cool air of renaissance shape and attract unique entrepreneurial talents History tells us something about the distinctive char-acteristics of renaissance cities The entrepreneurs of the Florence of the Medici excelled in textiles, banking and financial services and, led by such families as the Medici, became patrons of the arts and science Genoese entrepreneurs of the mari-time economy opened up new trade routes to Northern Europe and the West, in the wake of the accidental discoveries of their illustrious fellow citizen Christopher

Columbus, who was seeking a new route to the Indies ‘buscando el levante por il

ponente’ (seeking the Orient by moving Westwards) In Venice, the sea traders brought exotic goods and cultures from the Near and Far East to Western Europe

9 The Age of Broken Certainties

With the dam of medieval certainties breached, uncertainty, coached and supported

by the exercise of intelligence, opened a window on the landscape of the Renaissance whose perspective, starting with the Renaissance style, had its cradle in the theory

of vision, optics and light developed in Baghdad during the golden age of Muslim civilization by the mathematician Ibn al Haithan (965–1039), known as Alhazen in the Western world It was the beginning of a long happy time, manifested in the ascent of GDP per capita in Italy and the Netherlands, where the window was wider than elsewhere, as shown in Fig. 1.3

As Voltaire (nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) tells us in The

Age of Louis XIV (Voltaire 1751), Florence was at the heart of the third glorious age, preceded by the eras of Philip and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, and followed by that of the Sun King, Louis XIV ‘Then,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘a family of private citizens was seen to do that which the kings of Europe should have undertaken The Medici invited to Florence the learned, who had been driven out of Greece by the Turks; this was the age of Italy’s glory The polite arts had already recovered a new life in that

5 See, for example, https://medium.com/designing-atlassian/how-we-disrupt-ideation-c558b9ca 370#.h390k8gnt.

country; the Italians honoured them with the title of “Vertu”, as the first Greeks had

distinguished them by the name of Wisdom Everything tended toward perfection.’Imagine that we are in Florence between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, when prominent figures such as those of the monk and the knight give way to the merchant and the craftsman These new principal players perform the function of the silkworm which will later become a moth: this class of people with outstanding entrepreneurial skills—the ‘merchants of light’—saw into dis-tances most could not penetrate This is the dawn of discontinuous change leading

to the opening of previously untrodden pathways that threaten the authority of the holders of knowledge Thanks to the severing of the old social bonds and the new emphasis on the rights of the individual and secular studies, artists, humanitarians, scientists and urbanites of mercantile cities start to travel along those paths in a spirit of entrepreneurial adventure Masaccio (1401–1428), the first great exponent

of Renaissance painting, combined pictorial art and the mathematical art of tive Born in San Giovanni Valdarno near Florence, this Tuscan artist was a pioneer

perspec-of the cultural cross-fertilization which made the Italian Renaissance unique and universal Recombining creatively the most diverse segments of art—sculpture, painting, mathematics, geometry, architecture—Masaccio contributed significantly

to the cultural literacy that characterized the Renaissance and led to scientific lution and enlightenment

revo-The city of Florence experienced the beginning of the Renaissance which, with

the publication in 1486 of Oratio de hominis dignitate by the humanist Pico della

GDP per Capita in Selected European Economies, 1300–1800

(three-year average; Spain eleven-year average)

Portugal Spain

Fig 1.3 GDP per capita in selected European economies, 1300–1800 (3-year average: Spain

11-year average) Source: Fouquet et al (2015)

Mirandola (della Mirandola 1486), gave life to ‘Renaissance man’, free of chains, including those of the guilds that had restricted his movements in the Middle Ages Such ever-increasing individualism eroded the collective ideals of the Middle Ages The individual was placed at the centre and creativity was the key that opened the doors of entrepreneurship in unison with innovation.

The guilds controlled and kept the secrets of the trades they represented Their attitude towards technological and entrepreneurial innovations was inconsistent: some were more conservative than others If innate conservatism was not the primary cause of stifling innovation, change nonetheless depended on the leadership of a hierarchical decision-making process Individuals who felt unfettered by corporatist schemes shaped the craft shops of those who would become raised to the status of the greatest Renaissance artists In the centre of the scene were those who cooperated freely with one another to achieve a common goal From this era arose the founda-tions of our anthropocentric age, with innovative start-ups heralding the entrepre-neurship renaissance of the twenty-first century Supported by digital technologies that create the infrastructure of ‘knowledgefication’, whose force of transmission is comparable to that of the electricity networks of the early twentieth century, the growing power of the human mind voluntarily builds its future using mental gymnas-tics to manage uncertainties, being unable to predict what tomorrow will bring.Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, free-thinking Venice shaped another great Renaissance backdrop Thanks to special relationships developed between the Venetian Republic and Flanders, options and possibilities for artistic innovations coexisted with others entrepreneurial in nature (consider, for example, what was possibly the first assembly line, conceived and installed at the Arsenale di Venezia)

In 1482, and for the next 15 years, Milan stood on the shoulders of a giant at the service of Ludovico il Moro (1452–1508) Leonardo da Vinci—this is our giant,

acknowledged as a universal genius, whom Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), in The Lives

of the Artists (Vasari 1685), described as a ‘truly admirable painter, sculptor, art rist, musician, writer, mechanical engineer, architect, scenographer, master metal-worker, artillery expert, inventor, scientist’—not only gave Milan and its surroundings

theo-an artistic identity, but also helped to mark the trtheo-ansition from the feudal to the talist mode of production Thus a new era began in Milan and its surroundings, intro-ducing the profile of what would become the modern manufacturing entrepreneur

capi-10 The Spreading of the Renaissance Movement Mindful

of Entrepreneurship

It was in Florence that artists discovered—some would say rediscovered from the Arab science of the eleventh century—the use of perspective in paintings Later, the Renaissance was to follow different roads, from Florence, Venice and Milan Those who created new pathways were able to rely on the distribution of a written culture that emerged as a result of the invention of the ‘pocket book’ As a product of

cooperation between the technologist Aldo Pio Manuzio (1452–1515)—the first publisher of such works and perhaps the most famous printer of his time (see Matarese 2013)—and the humanist Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), the pocket book could be read anywhere, not just in public and university libraries.

The inauguration of an industry that previously did not exist can be a source of adjacent ideas which give rise to related entrepreneurial activities Thus the Bolognese Francesco Griffo (1450–1518) drew inspiration from Manuzio’s innovation to invent, and then put into an entrepreneurial practice, a new typographic style, that of the first italic type Ideas are waves that propagate through space and time; and so, in the twentieth century, and with the advent of digital writing, Steve Jobs undertook a re-evaluation of calligraphy and font design, to make this a hallmark of Apple

Crossing the Alps in the late fifteenth century, the Italian Renaissance fomented entrepreneurship by acting as a multiplier of commercial and cultural exchange between the countries and cities of Old Europe The lands conquered by Protestantism proved the most receptive to calls for the strengthening of entrepreneurship and freedom to conduct business in the style developed by Renaissance culture The radically decentralized system of government in the United Provinces (also known

as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands), which had liberated themselves from Spanish rule, promoted the commitment of the Dutch to generate financial wealth by creating commercial and manufacturing ventures The three pillars on which the Dutch ‘economic miracle’ was built, which spread to science and military art (the so-called ‘Dutch Golden Age’), across the seventeenth century, were: the solidity of the rule of law, the vigorous defence of property rights and contracts, and the low rates of taxation

In England, during the reign of Elizabeth I (1533–1603), distinguished scientists

such as the mathematician Robert Recorde (c1512–1558), controller of the Royal

Mint, advocated the applied sciences as a means by which people could have full control over the course of their lives From that time, a window opened on entrepre-neurial spill-overs arising from scientific findings; so much so that, jumping ahead some 400 years, in the USA since 1995 more than 75% of the increase in productiv-ity has been due to investments in science which resulted in new businesses More than 400 start-ups from universities have been created annually—amongst them were the protagonists of the digital economy such as Google, Netscape, Genentech, Lycos, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Cisco Systems Furthermore, uni-versity spin-offs proved to be much more long-lived than others: amongst those born between 1980 and 2000, 68% were still trading at the beginning of the new century, in contrast to the 90% of start-ups of other origins which had failed in the same two decades

In Japan, in the Togugawa period (1603–1868), education and entrepreneurship for the good of the nation marked a high point in the Japanese renaissance, giving rise to entrepreneurship that distinguished the Meiji period—the ‘period of enlight-ened rule’—under Emperor Mutsuhito (1868–1912).6

6 There is a helpful short essay on ‘The Meiji Restoration and Modernization [of Japan]’ on the

Asia for Educators website: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_meiji.htm

From the fifteenth century, coinciding with the European Renaissance, the Timurid renaissance created an artistic and entrepreneurial milieu with a strong stream of cultural and commercial exchange between Persia and the Mughal Empire (1526–1857) of the Indian subcontinent.7 Under the Grand Mughals, Ahmedabad, capital of the Sultanate of Gujarat, became a leading manufacturing centre which exported its products to foreign countries (Nehru 1946).

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bengal was the sance counterpoint to Medici Florence In the course of nearly a century and a half the Bengali renaissance was an innovative milieu of social and religious reformers, giants of letters and scientists Illustrious personalities such as Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), the multilingual physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist and writer of science fiction, and the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974), with their pioneering research that ranged from quantum mechanics (Nath Bose) to radio waves and experimental science (Chandra Bose) tilled the territory on which start- ups were then seeded and grew and which now enrich the landscape of the digital economy

renais-Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), a vibrant personality in the philosophical thought of the French renaissance, viewed diversity as the most universal quality The Bengal renaissance finds and maintains unity even in the most bewildering diversity of poets such as Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and experts and scien-tists like Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyendra Nath Bose Ideas from the two sides combine together and give rise to new ones, which live a life of their own It is with this well-rooted attitude that in essence the ‘renaissance personality’ of India stands out as a globetrotter, building bridges between cultures: proof of this is the circulation of talents in research and science-driven entrepreneurship between Silicon Valley in California and Bangalore, two ‘hot’ and ‘twin’ shores of all-round innovation

In North America, between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, the US renaissance is identified in particular by the determination of all its protagonists to give it a unique identity, typified by the self- confidence expressed with regard to new technologies The steel suspension cables

of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York are a visible sign of modernity in a nation that had begun its journey towards the goal of world leadership in politics and economics Against the backdrop of the arts and architecture that shaped the US renaissance, this confidence in technology is the impetus of what has been called the Gilded Age

of entrepreneurship in the USA

7 The Timurid dynasty, (fifteenth to sixteenth century) was ‘…of Turkic–Mongol origin, descended from the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) The period of Timurid rule was renowned for its brilliant revival of artistic and intellectual life in Iran and Central Asia.’ See, for example: https://www britannica.com/topic/Timurid-dynasty